Sue Russell's Blog: Sue Russell Writes, page 3

“The Illustrated Courtroom: 50 Years of Court Art” coauthor in New York Times

“The Illustrated Courtroom: 50 Years of Court Art” coauthor in New York Times

Great piece about my new book with co-author/courtroom artist Elizabeth Williams in the New York Times today. Very exciting! It focuses on Elizabeth, her work, her exhibition at the World Trade Art Gallery in Manhattan, and on the famous biz-world cases she has covered in her many years covering major trials. The book is available now for order on Amazon or at the CUNY Journalism Press page.

Women and Their Children in Prison: An American Tragedy

suerussellwrites:

Many years ago, I wrote about a program for women giving birth behind hars at Rahway Prison in upstate New York. Saw Jean Harris (then incarcerated for killing her lover Dr. Herman Tarnower and helping inmates at Rahway.) Babies who left that curious nursery environment (at age 1 year or thereabouts) often initially had trouble adjusting to the sounds of freedom. Traffic…and life in general. Some of their mothers had many years left to serve.

Originally posted on Kids in the system:

The following piece originally appeared on

Beacon Broadside

. Author and advocate Deborah Jiang Stein, through her own personal experience, brings to light a world so few of us know exists. Although the media–for better or worse–will focus on men in prison we hear very little about women serving time. It is a fast growing population, an invisible population, that is neglected not only in our public discourse about incarceration but in the prison world itself. Women in jail are horribly under-served, and that’s saying a lot since male inmates are equally under-served in terms of health care, mental health treatment, education and rehabilitative programs. And now Stein calls our attention to an even more invisible world, that of children born and raised in prison.

In her memoir Prison Baby, now available from Beacon Press, author Deborah Jiang Stein describes the pain and confusion she experiences upon finding out…

View original 512 more words

A couple of very heavy boxes of books…

There is nothing quite like the first time you hold your new book in your hands. In the case of Lethal Intent, it’s not a brand new book — but it looks like one with a great new cover and updated text about Aileen Wuornos’s decade on Death Row, execution and legacy. (The new eBook also has 16 new photographs.) December 3rd is the pub date but this part is fun, too.

How far would you go to protect a friend or lover?

Hopefully, few of us would cover for a killer.
 
We like to imagine that we’d do anything for our closest friends and loved ones. But “anything” is a huge, elastic concept. Would we really do “anything,” or even want to do “anything”? When the abstract turns concrete, things can look very different. Read more on Psychology Today’s Guest Blog
 

At age 10, James Venables killed toddler Jamie Bulger. At 27, he’s back behind bars.

 
Do you think British taxpayers should have to pay nearly $400,000 to hide the identity of someone who, as a child, committed one of the most horrendous crimes in modern British history? Do you support the government giving this notorious baby-killer another chance? And just how long do you think he should be protected? Read more on Women In Crime Ink

The value of timelines in writing crime books on the Stiletto Gang mystery writers’ blog

The true picture of a life comes into focus only slowly. The real, rather than imagined, existence essential to non-fiction can be inconveniently opaque, downright incomprehensible, and, in the case of serial killer Aileen Wuornos, unimaginably violent. Read more on The Stiletto Gang

In death, Aileen Wuornos finds fame she craved in life

Today, November 18, 2010, marks the 20th anniversary of serial killer Aileen Wuornos’s final murder. During her bloody killing year, she took the lives of seven men. In the end, she dropped her death row appeals, keen to get on her way to be with God, and was executed in 2002. But, I think she would get a kick out of seeing her face on the opening credits of television’s Criminal Minds amidst the mug shots of Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy, et al. And, I know she would enjoy still being written about. Her appetite for attention and celebrity was so huge that even before her murderous year, she actively tried to find someone to write a book about her life.Read more on Women in Crime Ink.